All the Stars

by BlueWay

When the Long Night of Solace is evaporated over Reach via the weaponized usage of a Slipspace Drive, it ferries with it in its swallowed sections the Covenant Empire and, more horrifyingly, the desperate measures that the UNSC used to fight them. When they are found in a universe on the precipice of their own history, the meaning of the term "Mass Effect" will change forever.

26. 1-19: Other People

A/N:

I'm sorry I'm not responding to all reviews, but rest assured they are all read and I appreciate them so much. I do have time to address a few things.
A few of you have noted the upcoming Reclaimer elements I am noting, and, as I stated earlier in the story they will be included to the point where it is not overbearing. Given the state of Halo canon, there are things that have to be addressed in such a story about Halo. One of these, as many have you have pointed out and I have well in hand, is that not only Mai a Reclaimer, but so is JD by virtue of what type of Humans they are. Mai is John-117's equal, and I will do with that what I may.

Another frank note, I haven't had much in the way of "Shepard defining" moments, but rest assured her time will come. I don't necessarily think that people read this story to focus, explicitly, on Shepard, but the intrigue of this story will, I think, coalesce best around Shepard at her relations to the Halo mythos as I put them in front of her. Also, we don't know much about my Shepard, do we now? I'll be affirming her character, because, remember, we are barely about halfway through ME1 at this point.

Also as many of you have written to me, yes, Mai holding onto Shepard during the Beacon event has repercussions as we see here.

Thank you for reading and reviewing, rest assured each of you make this story greater with your patronage.

---

1-19
Other People

---

"Our medical bay is full, we'll have her in her quarters." The second Shepard had been seen on the main deck of the Normandy in Mai's arms, her body seizing, froth at her mouth, there was something implanted in all of the crew that had not seen Shepard fall before the Beacon on Eden Prime. Chakwas had hurriedly ran through the main deck down to the crew deck, straight into Shepard's room as Mai deposited Shepard upon her room. It had been the first time since Mai had been there since Eden Prime, and Shepard had made it her own.

It was still very spartan, however on her work desk, there had been pictures, all taped to the wall behind her personal console. They were of soldiers, squads, from her past; pictures of kids and horses and travels. Heartfelt letters from fans, from those saved, from those that just needed someone to talk to. There were dozens of them, among the first things that she had seen every day. A picture of her family, and a younger Shepard, fresh out of the officer academy, had sat on that desk, and they were all smiling:

A stern, older man with short cut hair and a sunken in face, masculine and imposing but proud all the same had stood next to a woman that had very much been Shepard's mother. A splitting image, almost, but hair gone grey and cut short.

Shepard was on the latter half of twenty-nine, and yet, despite this, as Mai had taken a glance as she set the woman down on her bed, she had lived more lives than she as a Spartan ever had.

"Help me get her armor off." Chakwas ordered,

Shepard tossed and turned, her eyes beneath her lids alive and fighting as her fists closed upon herself and she held herself around her stomach, in pain.

Mai's strength had been, alone, the only reason why that had been averted as steel and nylon, future metals hit the floor and Shepard was stripped further, almost down naked as Chakwas had taken an instrument out of her pocket and snaked it up her shirt, listening to her heart, her insides for some closer recognition of what exactly was happening to her.

The last time she was just out, after Eden Prime. This was more violent.

"I see Jerusalem." Shepard said, chanted, spilled out of her lips like insanity. "Jerusalem."

What Mai had known of the first Jerusalem had been rudimentary, bare: It was where God died.

It made sense to her then why New Jerusalem was Hell.

All Mai could do was just stand there and watch as Chakwas did her work, Shepard's mouth dirty with herself.

The reveal of Shepard's abdominal as Chakwas snaked her hand up her shirt to diagnose, Mai had caught something: laterally, across her stomach, a single thin, muted line. It was a scar. A scar, long across her form, kept there. Shepard's arms, her hands, her legs, they all bore the rough patches and the scars of a warrior. Cuts, shrapnel, bruises and burns. Mai had counted them all. There were many.

How many scars did she herself have? How many scars did JD have, she wondered? For any to have actually beat into her suit, they had hurt and would've killed normal men and women. Even then, her body had become twisted and muted and rough from scars put on her by the Covenant and the Insurrection. Shepard carried her scars, apparently, but that scar on her lower stomach, it was different. Too clean, too uniform, too personal. Not a gut shot, or even a blade. It was too thin for that. Too polite.

Her shirt was pulled down again as Chakwas settled her diagnosis, catching Mai's eyes behind her visor somehow. Chakwas had moved her finger up to her lips.

Silence.

Mai tilted her head, hand raised up habitually.

Why?

Chakwas had looked at her oddly before shaking her head. "I have this from here, Chief Gul. Thank you."

---

Comms room, sans Shepard.

Pressly and Kaidan had the command.

Team leaders, official or not. Those not currently occupied with dealing with the fallout of Feros.

Chief Gul, Chief Durante, Lieutenant Alenko, XO Pressly, Engineering Chief Adams, and Sergeant Emerson. Chakwas had still been busy from Feros, attending to Shepard and all those that had been injured. The colonists however that survived were all out cold, like puppets loose from their master.

Spectre or not, Shepard still had an Alliance ship with Alliance personnel and the rule of conduct had survived in their minds. An all Human affair had been in the comms room, post-Feros. Shepard had been missing from that get-together for good reason.

Sergeant Emerson had rolled his arms together as he leaned back into his seat. "I don't think we can maintain an effective command if the Commander is constantly exposed to what she is. The Marine Corps does not engage delusions of the ancient. This isn't what we signed up for."

"I didn't think Hitman had its discretion in choosing what they are tasked for." XO Pressly had pressed upon Emerson.

Emerson glowered. "We are Commander Ryder's operators first, our tasking here was on a directive from Alliance command to support Shepard and keep a watch on Chief Gul and Chief Durante." There it was, out in the open: Hitman had been the Mai and JD's babysitters. "All of you. All of you were there at Altis. You know as well as anyone that they aren't Alliance. Not outright."

The uncomfortable truth that the first time the two of them had been on the Normandy: it had been in chains. Emerson had pointed to the two, side by side in their own seats as the rest of the command staff was very much tense.

"You're not Alliance, you're Covenant."

How wrong Emerson's accusation was. Mai, sitting blank faced, had hardened up at that moment as JD looked away, not even dignifying the Marine's accusation. Mai had been dressed down, in her Alliance uniform with the techsuit beneath still. In the hours since they had taken off from Feros the Normandy had been a mess; this meeting had been intended to bring an understanding why it was like that.

"You have no idea who we are, sergeant." Mai grit, and she stood tall. Without MJOLNIR it hadn't been her seven-foot stance, but at that moment she seemed ten, hands balled, still looking down on everyone there. "If Commander Ryder wanted to take care of us, he would've needed more than just a platoon to do so. Fall in line."

He would've needed armies, empires; more Spartans like her to contain.

"I don't take orders from you." Emerson beat back. "Not from someone who can kill colonists like that so easy. You had no right to do the damage you did."

"We were engaged. The results were preferable to any casualties on our end. If you're half the soldier you think you are you've made this call before."

"Enough." Kaidan had held his face in his hands. "We get it. Chief Gul and Chief Durante may not be who the Alliance tells us they are. I constrained them for Pete's sake! But they're not our enemy. Saren is!"

"Where I grew up, sir," Emerson said, staring up at Mai. "It's always our own."

How many militia groups? How many men and women of Human blood? Mai agreed, a cruel look on her face. The words that would've flowed from her mouth would've been that of blood and fire and she still tasted her own crimson between her teeth. Though she hadn't. Not when JD had spoken up. "I took an oath to defend Earth and her colonies. No matter the cost. I have never betrayed that. Who Commander Ryder thinks we are doesn't matter. We're soldiers."

JD spoke with such intensity it betrayed the persona people knew of him: of how quiet the man was and how isolated he had carried himself. And one more thing, "Ryder knows who we are, regardless. Just think about that." Maybe it was his father in him but he felt the need to get the last word in, like detectives of noir fiction's past.

The dangerous game that all of Shepard's crew played with her: secrets. They had known Shepard despised the thought of them, and yet, secrets were kept by Anderson's now absent word about the two Chiefs from Altis. Somehow their mystery had fallen on the wayside when confronted with Shepard herself.

Her condition was stable, though her thrashing, her high fevers and continued retching hadn't paid well to that idea. She rambled, in her bed, of ancient religions and coming apocalypses: darkness and reapers and tentacles, coming around her and squeezing the life out of her until her very bones popped out. She was stuck in nightmares. However, she fought in her dreams.

"Glass them! Glass them! Glass them all!" She would mutter, and it was reported, and JD and Mai would have to face that, somehow, someway, there was clarity in Shepard that betrayed them.

It was quickly becoming apparent however that this wasn't what a military officer should suffer; not while in command that is.

"Commander Shepard," Pressly started. He had always his reservations about what she was bringing on this voyage, of all the guidelines that she skirted and the aliens she brought on, but this went beyond his biases. "By God, do you know what it was like to know that I would be serving with her?"

"Pressly?" Kaidan rose an eyebrow, but the older man continued.

"That woman, the Commander, we've all heard the stories. About all her pomp and power, about how much a soldier she is and how much she cares about her people. She's like a saint to us bread and butter Seamen. So please know, what I'm about to say, I say it with full knowledge and full respect for the Commander," He had prepped himself, straightening his uniform before closing his eyes and raising his hand. "I move to remove the Commander from command of the Normandy, effective immediately."

Adams had been surprised, "Charles, come on you can't possibly mean that."

Pressly was career military, he had known the book like the bible as he had an answer. "Alliance Command states the obvious. If an officer's subordinates believe that they are completely and utterly compromised emotionally or mentally it is our prerogative to relieve her of command. You sit there and tell me that the Commander isn't compromised."

Compromised wasn't the word for it. Mai had the word for it: Tainted.

She had told no one of what Shiala had said. Why? She couldn't be sure herself, but there was something in all of her own indoctrination that had made her feel like that was all wrong and right in the same stroke.

Wrex had stayed tight lipped about it. Perhaps someone as long lived as he was had seen this again and again.

How often did people of this galaxy fall into their precursor's legacies? Enough apparently.

"Call a vote."

"Aye." Emerson's hand had immediately shot up. "It's nothing against the Commander. But just… look at her." The image of Shepard, of Humanity's golden girl, seemed to shy away with how she was now.

Pressly's hand had raised and Adams ran his hand down his face. "We really can't be doing this."

"I don't want to do this Adams. I really don't. But going by procedure is what I'm charged to do. For Shepard, and for everyone on the Normandy."

Was Shepard currently unfit to continue her command? Adams knew it. He was an engineer. Reading things by exacting terms was his thing, and to go against it would be to put himself in question. He rose his hand and Kaidan's eyebrows had furrowed, only to raise again as a hand to his side raised.

"Really Chief Durante?" Kaidan was surprised. Most people were.

Of all the things he was, he was a by the books Marine at heart. He had suffered enough to know that. JD nodded. "Her mission is important, yes, I believe that. We should pursue it. Though that doesn't mean the Commander has to do it. Not like this."

JD had forgotten how many NCOs or COs had crumbled, had gone insane in the war. So many mentally dissolved when the walls came in and left their soldiers on their own. So many dead because of it. He, of course, survived. It was why he had always let on to HQ to keep him low in rank, favors he had given for the very sake of him not ever being put in that position one day. He couldn't let someone die because he couldn't take command. It would kill him.

So, he understood. He understood more than people there would know.

"Well that's an interesting question then for Chief Gul." Pressly motioned to the woman. "The rest of the section chiefs are busy, but if you vote, we might have it here."

A choice.

How often did she have these things? None on this level.

Mai had been surprised that JD had voted in favor, but in that, it confided in her something of the man. He was still the soldier she had known; the UNSC had raised him up, just like her. Perhaps not in the way it had for her: down to her blood and bones, but it had still put itself into his head and heart all the same. The need for command, for the laws of warfare as dictated by the UNSC that would best engage the Covenant, it was still recognized by him, even transplanted now.

"I… do not think it is pertinent for me to vote in this." Mai answered.

"Well, then, answer this question then: Do you believe the Reaper threat is there?" Mai sucked in her gums as Pressly asked.

"What do you mean, Pressly?" Kaiden pressed on the XO.

"It's simple as this: Shepard is uniquely oriented to take on that threat. Whether or not it's a good thing is up to debate, clearly, but whether or not the threat is real enough to risk Shepard taking this mission on, that is what I'm asking fundamentally."

There was a feeling Mai had, on missions with ONI. There were ONI wetworkers, operators, ODSTs even, who she supported on planets behind enemy lines, in ruins not of Covenant or Human understanding. The reality of the UNSC and the Covenant had been that there were always larger fish in their pond, that the very ground beneath them had been created by someone else. In an apocalyptic war, Mai couldn't afford, if she even wanted to, the thought of a transcendental race being so present, yet so absent in their fight against the Covenant. However here, the Protheans, their absence, it had been front and center. The civilizations of the galaxy didn't build the Mass Relays, or the Citadels. The ruins of the Protheans were public record and plainly seen, so the question came of this: Where did they go?

Liara would've had an answer, Mai realized. She wasn't a scientist and couldn't answer empirically. What she could answer however was what she felt. Intuition.

And she didn't feel like there was anything there.

If it was a threat it would've been a threat beyond anything she could do about it, but whether or not it was true?

Mai ran her fingers against her knuckles.

She remembered Shiala though, her accusations, of ancient sins and cursed genes that she had. The speaking of a mad woman, probably having seen Shepard's visions too. Though there was something in Shepard's visions that had been true:

She had seen her get taken. She had known of New Jerusalem, of the UNSC, vaguely.

She knew that was true. Once, what felt like a lifetime ago now, it had been her reality.

It was as true to Shepard as it was to Mai, and transitively, the Prothean warnings, the idea of a Reaper, it too had to be true.

"Yes." Mai answered Pressly after a strained silence.

Kaiden puckered his lips and nodded once, relieved. Wasn't a win, but wasn't a loss yet.

Those that had voted against had seemed dejected, but fair was fair. The results weren't in yet. Joker had pinged the comm room. "We have an unknown signature on the long-range inbound hot. This might be our rendezvous."

"We'll continue this later." Pressly had the conn. The team leaders had moved up and out, but as Mai had gone to stand, there was a fire in her throat, beat down as she coughed once, a jolt of pain going through her body JD had barely caught out of the corner of his eye. She had moved before he could say anything, the team leaders going to the front of the Normandy by Joker and seeing what he saw. Before that however, Pressly and Emerson remained, a moment of time between them.

"Chief Gul… She's a killer." Emerson had let out of his mouth like a frosted breath.

"Aren't all of you jarheads?"

Emerson sucked in his lips as he shook his head. "I mean, yeah, but… I don't know. It's just the way she just does it. It's not like a conscious action for her. It's like a snap. She breaths the same way she kills; she just does."

"You good, Sergeant Emerson?"

In his mind's eye he saw the sharpness of a blade, its edge cut down to a degree that could split atoms, slicing across air. Mai was the very essence of that. A blade that simply cut through what was in its way.

"Have you ever pulled the trigger on someone, Pressly?" Emerson asked.

Pressly felt the sweat in his gloves stick. "No." The way he had killed was by being part of the machine that was a starship's crew.

"There's just a moment, before, and after, the hammer falls that you just snap in your mind. Like a picture. It sticks with you, it pauses you, even for the smallest second. It is so infinitesimally small that I sometimes doubt that it's there, but it is, and I didn't see Chief Gul, at all, think about gunning down those colonists. They were Human, for Christ's sake."

There was something haunting about Mai that imprinted on the minds of Hitman the second she gunned down those people who looked like them. Something primal; something that clawed at the animal minds in them, and quite frankly Hitman had changed in realization that Mai could not, should not be tested. Held accountable, maybe, but tested: no.

Joker would often recount to Mai about the specifications of the Normandy and how it had always seemed one of a kind to him. She would, at hours at a time, accompany him in the cockpit and learn, gradually, how it was to fly the Normandy. How it flew, how it felt beneath his fingers, he had confided her all of this. She didn't have that particular sentimentality when it came to flying, but she understood. The Normandy was only a machine. One of many even. Example number one of the Alliance's new scout and stealth vessel. The Normandy would always hold the title of Normandy, but distantly, one of its sister ships had blinked into view through the viewing screens. Like looking in a mirror, a Normandy-class ship had emerged and gone nose to nose.

"This is SSV Ardennes, hailing the SSV Normandy. Normandy how copy?"

A navigator had mumbled an aside to a compatriot: "The sister ship."

Joker had nodded at the message as he flicked it over to Pressly to answer.

"SSV Normandy copies you clear Ardennes. Are you transferring the colonists?"

"Aye. Beginning docking procedures on your go."

As the noses of the two Normandys had lined up, side by side, a metal tube had extended from their airlocks, interlocking.

"Could make a docking joke, right about now. But that's too easy." Joker was one of the very few of the Normandy to be a relative ease with Mai nearby, she crossing her arms by him as she stood near the co-pilot seat, familiar with it in her short time under his tutelage so far. "You know any good ones with your hands, Chief Durante?" Joker looked over his shoulder as the Normandy's VI went through its own checks, connecting to the two ships.

What language do deaf pigs speak?

Swine language.

JD shook his head at the man. "Gotta work on your speaking material first."

Mai had risen one of her fingers to her mouth, curled beating back an unknowable… something that JD had risen out of her. She made no sound, but it was something as the rest were concentrated on the airlock.

Joker had feigned a wince of pain at JD's jab, but came off okay. "Shep doing okay?" Joker had allowed JD to lean on his seat. They were friendly, if by virtue of how outwardly normal JD had been.

JD had shrugged. "Not really."

"Shame." Joker had taken off his cap, running back thinning hair. "You'd think someone like her would be untouchable."

"Hm?" JD had turned over to the Normandy's pilot.

"Oh you know. Not many people can talk a terrorist out of wrecking a colony. Let alone a terrorist who attacked Elysium."

It took a few moments, but JD knew what Joker was talking about.

An asteroid last year, meant for mining, had been redirected to hit Terra Nova by malice. Shepard had been there to respond to it. Batarian terrorists who had been vengeful after Elysium, after what Shepard herself had done to them, came face to face again with her. Reckoning came. The details of what happened were clouded with classification and the usual military tape, however, at the end of the day, the situation had been relatively bloodless. Relatively. As far as Shepard was concerned, bloodless was stretching the term, but she had a way of words, of understanding.

She spoke the word of God sometimes.

Nowadays she spoke from demons and devils and the crew had known it.

"Do we tell them about Shepard?"

"Tell who? These guys? The Council?"

Whispers as the metallic clacking of the two ships docking reverberated throughout.

"Real vulnerable right now, if we weren't anywhere safe." Joker remised, looking through the windows. The Normandy had been in Alliance space as of current, on the way to Altis on last orders from Shepard before Feros. Transmitted to her and plotted before the QRF action. "You know that there are people out there who still think space is some frontier, or something?" Joker gently tapped JD's side with his elbow.

Stars.

So many stars above the Normandy's windows.

"I had a roommate, back at the academy, wanted to pilot a lone ship if the Alliance didn't work out for him. Become some sort of space cowboy. But, you know, space has kinda been taken. It's all political lines now. No freedom to it. Speed limits here, tolls there. It's always around. Can't get away from it." Joker had seen JD staring up and out.

Perhaps it was by the grace of him being born on a moon, not a planet, that had given him this view of the stars, every day. He was born amongst stars and, chances were, he was going to die among them. Given the choice he'd rather look up than down; and the irony hadn't been lost on him as a soldier who had literally been dropped.

He looked up and saw stars.

"I wanted to travel more, as a kid." Pressly and Emerson had been awaiting by the airlock as well, close enough to hear JD speak. For Mai, JD, speaking like he did now, it was loud to her. In her mind's eye it was her focus as he seemed distant. "But, my parents, they said it was too dangerous. That home was where we needed to be until… until things were different."

Mai looked up at the stars, following JD's eyes. "You wanted to travel." She parroted.

What kind of person would any of them be without the Covenant? It was a question that passed her by more than she knew how to mentally process. It was that way because, at the end of the day, it meant that she would've been nothing but a vagrant, less than what she was now. And yet still JD had detested it.

She didn't understand.

The airlocks had interlinked and, after a slight humming, of pressuring, the two airlock doors had opened into one long corridor, on each side a Normandy. A mirror, the same save for its crew. Footsteps on metal, JD and Mai hadn't seen who walked across until the pleasantries were exchanged and words were spoken.

"I wish things could've gone better." A voice had said.

Pressly had sighed. "Me too."

"We'll have our people unload your passengers and casualties and be on our way. With that being said, we also have some reports to collect."

Mai and JD, they had almost forgotten. They had almost forgotten they were debriefed and questioned for their lives hours after they had arrived here. They stepped out of the cockpit approaching the airlock to confirm their suspicions:

Sunglasses and Cleft-Lip. Unmistakable. It was some time since their interrogators had chimed up. Clad in uniform and dress much like Shepard. So far removed Mai had finally put a name on why they had been so familiar. ONI had its counterpart in the Alliance Intelligence corps. Nothing as bad as testing on children, however she wasn't going to pry. It wasn't her field anymore.

A man with a cleft-lip, and a man with sunglasses. In the darker lighting of the Normandy they finally saw the hint of blue beneath his shades: cybernetics.

"Chief Gul, Chief Durante. How are you?" Sunglasses approached and Emerson and Pressly seemed taken aback by how open he had been to them. JD and Mai had been almost equally as uneasy.

Mai was silent, but stood at attention. JD had answered slowly. "We're fine… sir?"

Sunglasses had held his hands up, unoffended. "No need for the formality."

Cleft-Lip had played blocking for Sunglasses as Emerson and Pressly tried to interject, but instead he had flared his omni, a projection of identification coming up. "We're Alliance Intelligence. I'm Commander Lucy Cyma and my compatriot here is Commander Oscar Horne."

Horne had adjusted his dark sunglasses nodding at Mai and JD. "We're friends of Master Chief Gul and Master Chief Durante."

Emerson seemed shocked at this all. "The Ardennes is an Alliance Intelligence asset?" Emerson started slow, trying to piece this new information together.

"The Normandys are all stealth vessels." Horne had shrugged. "You do the math Marine."

---

It was immediately noticeable to the Spartan and the ODST that the Ardennes ran more in line with Alliance military standards than the Normandy. Or maybe it was just the fact that the two hadn't felt as welcome on the Ardennes than on the Normandy. The very absence of the Normandy, that unknowable aura, it was revealed to JD and Mai. They weren't comfortable, but it wasn't not comfortable on the Normandy.

Still it was familiar as Cyma and Horne led the two Chiefs into the Ardennes and its comm room, having called for them to follow.

Before they had entered however: JD tapped her knuckles.

Rock. Paper. Scissors. Shoot.

Paper did beat rock.

Mai had gone in first with a little disappointed smirk on her mouth, dried blood still on its corners.

"Authorization: Horne Alpha-Foxtrot-Six-Six."

"Command confirmed. You may proceed commander." The VI of the Ardennes had hummed inside of the comm room as Horne and Cyma turned around, the four of them standing.

Perhaps the reason why they were intelligence agents was the fact JD, usually perceptive, was unable to get a read on them. They were neutral. Neutral as ever. Same neutral as they had been questioning them first.

"If we had known," Horne started, taking off his sunglasses and letting the blue cybernetics in his eyes shine out. "That putting you on the Normandy would mean having you caught up in all of this, I'm not entirely sure whether or not we'd still put you on there."

"You still would've?" JD had asked outright, unable to drop his tenseness.

Cyma licked his lips habitually, the cleft in it passed over as he closed his eyes and nodded. "Special circumstances that overwrite even your circumstances. Respectfully, although, in a quieter universe, you two would've been the center of it. Hell, you could've ended up as the reason for war. But unfortunately, that's not the universe we're living in."

"And what universe are we living in?" A question that the two of them did ask at one point, spoken again by Mai as she held her arms behind her back and still stood at attention. Habit. Habit made from too many ONI Commanders.

"The one where Humanity's golden girl has, within her, the truth of the apocalypse and is the only one that can do anything about it."

Horne had sat on the comm console as Cyma sat in one of the chairs of the comm room. They were tired. So tired.

"I'm sorry…?" JD had felt compelled to apologize.

It was appreciated, albeit awkward as the two actual spooks seemed breathed out a breath.

Cyma held his hands out. "You two are important. We get that. You're two Human refugees from a universe where Humanity was about to be wiped out, and, on top of that, one of you is also a genetically modified super soldier." A palm went flat to Mai and she nodded. "We applaud you for taking this in stride so far. Honestly. Reports from the other section leads offer, mostly, benign notices about you."

Mostly. JD caught on the word, but Horne continued for Cyma as he held his head back.

"But the fact of the matter is we're also facing down this Reaper threat."

JD was honestly shocked. For all the tooth pulling from the Council these Alliance spooks understood? "The Alliance understands then?"

The Alliance did more than understand. The two nodded. "We want you to stick with Shepard." Horne interjected. "These are your new orders effective immediately."

The two of them had shuffled in their own way, JD anxiously crossing his arms as Mai stood even more rigid.

"The Alliance has always had a certain… outlook on Commander Shepard." Cyma continued. "Events before your time here has made the Admiralty… liable to trust Shepard, within due cause of course. Even if it means believing the Reaper threat. Captain Anderson echoes the same, of course."

"And you believe in her dreams?" JD asked, uncertain of what he was hearing.

"Well, from the reports we have extrapolated from Doctor Chakwas, they're not just dreams, are they?" The two intelligence agents looked at Mai.

"She knows. Somehow." Mai answered, head bowed for the briefest second. "It was on Eden Prime."

The two intelligence agents shared a look, "Anderson told us she suspects something of you two, but can't place what. And you don't want to be suspected by her of anything." Horne went on.

"So what do we do then?" Mai asked. Not out of fear or anxiety, but of the options she was supposed to have as a Spartan.

"Play it by ear, keep your security about you… But we need you to stay here. On the Normandy, you're still effective assets and Shepard needs people of your caliber around."

Again, JD had his ear about him. His fingers tapped against his arm in consideration. "Why is it important that Shepard not know?"

The two intelligence agents sucked in the spit in their mouths as they decided, silently, who would answer. "Wherever there is a threat to Humanity, to the innocent, the innocent, Shepard will go out there and quell it."

"Well, most good people would, right?" JD had asked a question and the agents turned over to the comm console, bringing up footage, bringing up the record.

"That's… Not what I mean." Horne explained. "Shepard without her empowerment by the Council was already dangerous to the system of things. There is just the pure determination and disregard for our preconceptions of the boundaries that we have in place."

"Is Shepard… a threat?" Mai asked, curious, trying to put her mind around something that seemed so outlandish to her.

"Yes, no, maybe I don't know." Horne went on before Cyma spoke after him.

"This world, this galaxy, is built on the belief that everything we do affects one thing or another. It is with that care that the Turians don't invade Human space, the Krogan don't rise up again, and the Salarians keep covert with their intelligence operations. It's why there are some times we know, but we cannot do. Hell! I'm pretty sure that Quarian, Miss nar Rayya, is stealing the readouts from the Normandy's stealth drive."

"And you're okay with that?" Mai's eyes widened and her blue eyes were sharp at that moment.

"We stole our side of the tech from the Salarians and the Turians copied it off an Asari prototype that was buried after we pressured them to cancel their own project in favor of territory rights. The Normandy project itself was kickstarted because of some wealthy military-industrial benefactors heavily propositioned the Admiralty into their design. Will we do anything about it? No. Because the Quarian Migrant Fleets is currently within, its entirety, within Alliance space."

"Is it right?" Cyma posed. "No, it's not. But we can't do anything."

Horne had gestured to the wall, to the Normandy beyond it. "Now imagine we have someone, a special forces soldier, top of her class, given the fucking authority to do as she wishes, who will chase the injustices of this life without regard for what she will knock down in the process. This galaxy is built on beliefs and she will knock down those pillars because, at some point, all of our truths are rotten to the core. And the absolutely terrible thing about it as that we still need her."

Cyma followed up and there was belief in his eye. "She is the impulse for people that we have in our weakest moments; she is the thought of "I wish this person was dead" and, somehow, someway, it happens."" A force of God, striking lightning bolts.

"I am predisposed to the same purpose." Mai had declared. It wasn't loud, or brash, but a state of being.

Horne rose his finger at her. "You, Spartan Mai, are a miracle. You are what the UNSC needed, and you were built for that purpose. Shepard is a fluke. In what world does a sane organization let someone like her have power? In what causality does someone like Shepard get made?"

"I've seen Shepard fight." Mai continued. "She is supremely competent yes, but is there more to it? I don't understand?"

Horne took in a breath, remembering who had been in front of him. "Imagine, if you knew the Covenant homeworld, or whatever they have… High Charity, you could get there, you go through to them. You could end the war. But doing so would you mean you have to break something fundamental about the very ground you stand on. Shepard considers no cost in her actions in the grand scale of things, not because she doesn't know, but because she understands it doesn't matter to the people she is trying to save."

"Who did she kill?" JD had spoke up, all of the sudden. He was his father's son, after all. He had the blood of the investigatory in him. The two intelligence agents were surprised.

Cyma straightened his lips as Horne turned away. "Shepard, a few months before you all showed up, she led a rogue contingent of N7s out of Alliance space. She somehow tracked a bunch of Cerberus-affiliated scientists related to the Thresher Maw incident on Akuze and, she gunned them down, just outside of a colony. Thirty seconds, that was all it took for years of progress to be wiped away."

Cerberus. JD and Mai had done their reading. Their manifesto had been oddly familiar to them. It spoke to them in a way that had been familiar, and yet… They knew it was wrong. Humanity-affirming, Humanity-preserving, Cerberus, working from the shadows, heeded only by conspiracy theorist and aliens who had to blame Humanity for something, it had been in their briefing packets provided by Anderson originally before the Normandy. It was part of their reading in Buffalo, and, now, a part of Shepard's history.

"Alliance Intelligence was working general leads on Cerberus, well, one of those scientists was one of our plants; a double agent. They died that day… And, quite frankly, we couldn't hold Shepard to a court."

"Why?"

"Because we would have to tell her that the Alliance was complicit, at the barest edges, in what had transpired on Akuze. We couldn't risk Shepard's integrity for that. She's too important for Humanity's image. Hell, she would've come after us, somehow."

"If I told Shepard about the Covenant, then, she would try to take them all." Cyma held his hands together as Mai put two and two together. "She would hold them all to justice."

"Which is why your orders are to maintain your background and relation to them a secret."

"But she would." There was danger there in that room now, palpable danger. Mai, even without her armor, was still over six and a half feet of iron bone and muscle. It was a dare.

Horne's eyes glowed in their electric blue. "Spartan Mai, understand that there are politics to this now. Politics which we all have to abide by. There is no politics in war of course, where you two come from, but we are not at war."

"Then the Covenant would lead us there. We know it." Mai had spoken. "You know it."

"The Covenant? You don't think we understand that we have something as ravenous and culpable as the fucking Rachni within Human borders? We have never once doubted your disposition on the Covenant, but what we're dealing with here isn't the Covenant, not as you knew it. Same as how, probably, you two aren't the same people than when you first came here."

This life changed them, day by day. They were no longer just an ODST or a Spartan, tasked to do one thing for however long their lives went on. Their lives belonged not to a UNSC or a war, but to themselves, distinctly.

"We have to take them on their word. Do you understand? Or else we're acting on yours, and the end result to that is subjugation and war and the very truth of you… How do you think the war you fought was going to end? A peace treaty? Handshakes? An understanding that would forgive millions and millions of lives gone? No. We know what extinction wars are like. It ends with genocide. Your context, this war, is no longer a factor."

"But it still matters to me dammit!"

JD had never heard Mai snap like that before, her composure lost, the word of damnation on her lips as her fists clenched and her voice, her breath, was raw.

Was she breathing a little more heavily?

The two intelligence agents were awash with a feeling of intimidation, of feral and ingrain fear built into their DNA. Horne had gulped, but breathed out dryly. "You're the only one that thinks that, Spartan. They couldn't give less of a damn. You two are only a man and a woman. You are not worth their time."

For that, JD would be thankful, forever. That their crusade was not meant for him now, but Mai wasn't convinced, her entire form vibrating in rejection. Before she opened her mouth again in protest Horne had caught it:

"Go, pull your contract right now, go into the galaxy and kill everyone you think is a threat to Humanity. We'll see how much progress you make before Shepard has to hunt you down. Just like Saren."

Silence.

Complete silence.

Minutes, hours, days. The distance of four centuries, a war, an expansion of humankind in one context over another, it defined the two pairs there in that room.

Horne and Mai were poised to butt heads, but Cyma raised his hands up, licking his cleft lip, instead offering this as JD stood ready for something. Not anything he knew, but for a something he would have to do. Could he pull Mai off Horne? Probably not. Did he have to try? Yeah.

"What do you two want? In the end?" Cyma offered instead, and the spring in JD sprung.

The answer that came out of JD's mouth had come so fast, so naturally, it scared him. "I just want to live a normal life."

Mai's glaring down at Horne had been broken as she softened her own blue eyes, locking onto JD's by habit now. He spoke to her, it felt.

"And you, Chief Gul? What do you want out of your life?"

Minutes. Minutes passed as Mai thought and thought. This was never a choice she was supposed to make on her own. Her helmet could not protect her as her face was bared to the three men and it showed of a war in her mind, trying to dig up an answer that, eventually, left nothing but this:

"I do not know."

---

There were a few things in life, in his long, long, long life that Wrex had to be gentle about. Approaching Asari that had just barely gotten above their first hundred had been one of them. Then again Liara T'Soni had hardly seemed as spook as he thought she would be when he had approached her in the crew deck, sitting at the mess table with a blank expression on her face.

"Oh. Hello. Wrex, is it?" She looked up at him after taking in his form. Easily over four times her size and probably eight times her weight. She tried to keep cool but Wrex had known the sort. He wasn't really an easy someone to be in the presence of.

"Mm." He grunted, taking a seat at a seat that would actually be able to take him in in his armor.

"Can- can I help you?" Liara's notes as usual had been strewn on the table, but they hadn't been touched. She was deeper in her own head.

"Not really," Wrex rolled his head one side, getting rid of an annoying tautness in it. "I just want to ask you something."

"I, uh, okay." She was nervous, yes, but not because of him.

How long had it been since the first time he'd killed someone? It really didn't matter to him, for all the centuries he had put in between. She would learn one day, in all the centuries she had to live forward, he thought. "I know what it's like to meld. A matriarch, back in the day, me and her had some good times." Wrex was distant for a moment. Memories of her came rushing back. Memories she had, literally, given him. "I know how it can be used."

"Oh?"

Clashing, dreadfully, indistinct. Chakwas reappears out of Shepard's room and the sound of her struggle remerged and disappears with the door opening and closing. Pain. It was the sound of otherworldly pain.

Chakwas had patted a towel at her head as she passed by the two sitting at the mess, on the way to her office to grab more supplies, stopping for a brief second, she had uttered this: "She's awake."

Liara didn't know if it was a good thing as Chakwas was in and out in a flash, slugging drugs in her bag at back into Shepard's quarters.

"Are you okay, by the way? I heard you got your first kill planetside." Liara was surprised Wrex had considered. She was cautious in answering as Wrex, ever unreadable in his Krogan ways, looking at her with reptile eyes.

"I shouldn't be feeling anything," Her eyes drifting back to papers and reports that were just blending to gibberish in her post-battle haze. "It was something that had to be done."

Wrex had glanced to the data pads and the physical papers. Actual paper. "Death is a historical constant it looks. Great empires right down to us little things."

"I suppose it has gifted me a more personal understanding." Liara spoke. "If I may, can we change subjects?"

"Mm. I want to ask you something about melding, if you can."

Liara had blinked once or twice before remembering what he had opened up on. "Oh? How may I help?"

Wrex looked over his shoulders before sitting down next to her. The deck was bare, even from the guards. The entire Normandy had been occupied or stressed from Feros. "To what extent, in a meld, is what we see true?"

Liara looked at Wrex with a certain confusion. She was by no means an expert in melding, she had hardly done it in the last hundred years, and in no times recently, however there was something Wrex had been specifically looking for. "It is… expected, in a meld, that both people are willing to open themselves up. In a meld everything is on the table."

"What is everything?"

"Thoughts, memories, experiences, feelings-"

"How about dreams? Imagination?" Wrex posed to her.

"Mmm. No, not typically, if at all. Only the matriarchs are capable of such lucid melding."

"Hm. Right." As roughly as he arrived, he had left her alone at the mess table. For hours Shepard was heard, screaming, in pain, from her room as Chakwas had tried her best to stabilize her, and all Liara and the crew could do was listen as their commander went through Hell.

---

There is pain in her existence.

Her first conscious thoughts as she wakes up on wet sheets is that she is alive. Her second thought is that that is a mistake as she feels utter pain.

It's over her bones, in every breath she takes. She can feel, for the first time in her life, her blood run through her veins in a burning scrape against her insides. There is only one time in her life that she has felt this pain in any vague measure, and it's a part of her life she has hidden away. However, this pain, it has come from nowhere. Her existence in pain and yet there is more above that, like rocks dropping above into the magma.

In her more tangible moments, she sees Chakwas above her and her nurses. She knows their names: Willard, Marie, sometimes Doc Lamareux from Hitman is there. They look at her in worry and she doesn't doubt them. She must not look too hot as she tries to voice sound from her throat (Hey, Marie, just like that time you dipped your arm in that coolant huh? She tries to say to the female nurse) and instead a groan comes out.

They're pumping her full of drugs, hazing out her vision. What she sees out of her eyes is like a dream of a dream, and her ear drums are low and muted.

Then it happens: As if she was shot. It's against her shoulder as she feels four piercing pains as if something was stabbing her, and those invisible objects explode out from her skin. She screams as she thinks she hears crystals cracking.

And it happens again, in a different part of her body, and again, and again. Seven this time and they burn her as if she has felt a grenade go off in her chest.

She feels a different fire attach itself to her thigh, and, by instinct, even in her state, she tries to reach down as if wanting to rip something off. Her body reacts to stimuli, to pain in ways she had never known, and her mind goes through a checklist she can barely understand. There is no permanence for her in this state, her mind receding and then expanding, a headache not even beginning to describe it.

There is something that was once there, she knows, she desperately tries to understand. It's where her pain comes from, this feeling of war, but there is no memory to it.

She only thinks of herself, thinks of the crew that depended on her to get the fuck up and over whatever was happening to her.

She talked to Ashley recently, to see how she was fighting into the Normandy after the loss of her unit. She says every victory of hers on the Normandy is because of them, and she keeps fighting for them. Every Geth tincan in the ground means another unit like her old one survives. She is a Marine, Shepard knows. Like so many she had seen die on Torfan by her order.

Kaiden she wonders about in frank jest. He's polite for a Marine. Too understanding, to open; a nerd almost, but exactly the type of person the Galaxy needs. Still she knows that he doesn't command well on his own, especially with characters like Hitman, so used to violence of action and the action of violence. She's sixteen again, in India, when she thinks about Kaiden. A local boy, no older than how old she was when she started wandering Earth, wanted to travel with her. She only showed him his own way by the time they got to Argentina. Kaiden reminds her of him.

She's worried about Tali in that same breath. She is a young woman that has no right to be fighting the wars of her ancestors, creating hate against an enemy like that. Her Marines, the Normandy itself, is only an enabler of that. Next time they talk, and they will, she wants to maybe lighten up: She wants to remind Tali to be young before the galaxy hardens her.

"When Chief Durante- I mean, JD, when he puts on his armor, he reminds me of a Quarian. It's nice."

"Oh…?"

"Uh, I mean nothing by it, just an observation, yeah."

She remembered in their last conversation it wandered to the crew, and then to JD and Mai. Shepard could always peg some inclination of blushable curiosity in someone's voice. She could see how Tali could be impressioned upon by JD: his very mystique and the way he carried himself around. He was a handsome man, reserved; soft in such a way. The smell of rain followed him in her mind.

As if gravity is passing through her like a wave, she goes rigid in another pained groan on her bed.

She thinks of Mai and, for a brief, blissful moment, there is confidence and understanding and clarity. She thinks about being a Spartan, and it allows her to grit her teeth just a little less as a war is fought and her body and soul is the battlefield.

All she can do is run her thumbs over her knuckles, count the seconds, and think about where it hurts. Not why.

---

This was what winning looked like, JD thought.

He'd never been there for the Insurrectionist operations. He'd never seen body bags of men and women spread like this except if it was because of the Covenant. Never because of another Human. This was just an inkling, an image, of what those years of Anti-Innie operations had looked like for the Spartans, and it was at his feet.

Twelve bags.

Twelve bodies.

One had been because of Liara, granted, but the rest had been from Mai. Almost all headshots. Mr. Blake had his lungs collapse from one of Mai's strikes, and another had their heart stop outright after a kick from her. That was the force of her mettle, and it felt so very very wrong.

He wouldn't lie to himself. He found pleasure in seeing Elites, in Grunts, in Hunters and Brutes being torn apart by explosives or gunfire. It was the very least cruelty that they deserve in turn for all they had done to Humanity. Though, he had to think. Of all that gore and violence put on the Covenant, the same had been done to these people, these Humans, by the Spartans.

"It was like… nothing I'd ever seen." A Hitman from Marine spoke it like a ghost story, just moving his arms in imitation of Mai, as if holding her DMR. "Blip, blap, bam."

The Ardennes had been handling the transfer of the bodies off and away, its crew in the Normandy well deck transferring the bags off.

Horne and Cyma had reaffirmed their directions to him and Mai. Nothing would change, but this was understood. They had to be on the Normandy, helping Shepard.

And yet, it was a miraculous thing. The two of them wanted to help Shepard, because it was Shepard.

There were little logistical things about him and Mai that the two agents went through further, pay and expectations, communications privately going forward, but, asides from the inherent weirdness and anomalies of what they were doing, everything was going fine with their involvement.

The two agents assured them the Covenant was being kept contained, and for their own sanity, they had to take them at their word.

The familiar tempo of a pair of footsteps was at his back as JD observed the body bags be turned out by the crew of the Ardennes. The rest of Hitman had either retired to stasis or were dozing in the bay themselves.

"Garrus."

"JD."

"You good man?" Garrus had asked of JD as he felt the knock of the back of his talons against his head gently. JD still frozen for a second. His habits were still there. He could count the amount of times he had felt the grip of an Elite on him, and was incredibly lucky that he had been able to count more than once.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine."

"Heard you got a crate over your head back there."

"Yeah. It's what the helmet is for though."

Garrus had tilted his head over at where their armor usually was: on their side of the bay by the Mako. Mai and Tali had been talking surprisingly.

The Turian gestured over his shoulder however to Hitman's lockers however. "Some of the colonists came at us with some personal affairs. Hitman has, uh, claimed some items."

JD didn't know what to think of that, but he had stood by as some of his squads were guilty of the same. ODSTs like them were often the last in before a planet was glassed. So, who cared if some jewelry or trinkets were taken in pockets.

"Right." The numbness of his head where Garrus tapped him through his hair resounded for a moment, but went away.

"One of them was a guitar, and I mentioned to them, you played." Right. JD remembered he did mention to Garrus over dinner one day he did play, or, at least, practice a bit. "They're expecting a big show, or else I'm lined up."

"Wouldn't mind seeing you sing, now that I think about it." JD had said as another body bag was wheeled out to the elevator. The fact he had tried to quip went down sour.

Garrus chuckled briefly, putting a little more vibrato in his words at that moment. "The ladies like my voice around here, so they tell me."

"Who tells you?" JD scrunched his face. Even though almost half of the crew had been women he hadn't pegged any that would talk to Garrus about this.

Garrus backed up, realizing how much he bit off. "I mean, Tali says. We compare notes when we look over gear sometimes and I'm not really the type of guy to see a girl after the night so her input is valuable. I also hate recordings of my voice, they just never come out right and-"

"Hm." JD had cut off his rambling as the dead were carted away.

"You're not… this good, are you?" Garrus hadn't seen Mai do her job. He was, literally, knee deep in colonists with nothing but his baton. When he emerged out he had found Liara over a dead man and the colony destroyed. He wondered if JD would've done the same in Mai's position.

JD looked to Mai, hunched over her weapon at her workstation, ever working, ever quiet, ever a black hole in the room that hurt to look at. "Never." Was all JD could answer.

It was once said in ire, this: if ODSTs were any better, they'd be Spartans.

Mai's body jumped a little bit in her seat as she brought a hand to her mouth, muffling an episode of coughing. It was only because JD had been looking over at that very moment did he see blood in her palm.

He had wedged his elbow to tap Garrus's side. "Dinner later, right?"

He was surprised he had done that. Garrus hadn't been far off as he had just rewound what JD had just did. A good-natured wing in the side, gentle, if not masculine.

Old habit on JD's part; for those that he had truly called friend in the ODSTs. The fact that he had done that made his stomach swirl for a moment in cold and his face light up in heat.

Dear God, I'm making friends again. That worried him. Worried him to his bones.

"Oh yeah, sure." Garrus responded, and JD had nearly tripped as he made his way across the bay to Mai.

---

Mai knew she was many things; she also knew she was good at many things. To not admit that would be to betray her training and the thousands of hours of teaching that had been drilled into her by Ambrose, by Mendez, by Deep Winter. It was the grey areas of her, the areas of expertise she had yet to dabble in but was assumed to be hyper-competent in, that had bugged her. In one galaxy she might've been an expert at the manual of arms of many UNSC weaponry and their breakdowns.

This was not that galaxy.

This was a galaxy where a Quarian had been guiding a super soldier through the basic motions of Mass Effect weaponry. Favor for a favor.

Better to think about that than the Covenant and her orders.

"You need my help?" Tali had been as surprised as anyone could be, and Mai had simply nodded once. Unfortunately for Mai, she had asked the one person on the Normandy who could tell her unique body language. She was uncomfortable asking, unused to it, with the way her eyes almost looked away from her when asking.

Who was Tali to say no to a Human that very much looked like she could eat her whole?

Half an hour. That's all it took for Mai to get Tali's impromptu lesson on how she personally had taken to modding weapons down, for Mai had seen her do it a bit to her own, new, personal shotgun. She had seen her new kit get put together with the considerations of her experience on Feros: SMG on her hip and a shotgun on a sling. Curious.

"Again. I know it might seem paradoxical to have a computer put a limiter on a weapon. Though it's there for a reason. These things aren't like that-" Tali gestured to Shepard's classical wooden sniper rifle, hanging over the weapon lockers like a decoration. "Take it from a Quarian. If there were an easier way of doing things, we would've done it."

"I see." The two of them had stared at Mai's M-13 DMR, having been put together after its most intensive breakdown yet. It was somewhat relaxing, all things considered, and for all of Mai's disposition toward anything that hadn't been Human, Tali was tolerable. It distracted them from the Ardennes crew taking away the comatose and dead colonists.

"I'm in contact with my father, every time we near a beacon." Mai rose an eyebrow at her and she had immediately gotten defensive. "Oh no no no no it's okay I cleared it with Shepard and everything. It's just that, recently, he tells me the Geth that people are coming across are using ejectable thermal clips instead of the traditional method. So, who knows, maybe things will change… I'm not really big into guns and stuff, but it's interesting to learn that the Geth are learning like that."

Tali was a spy, she remembered from the two agents, stealing Human secrets. In another timeline, maybe, Mai would've taken her neck and broken it like Shiala for and punish her for it.

Though this wasn't where she would do it. The higher power of Alliance Intelligence had a pulse on it, apparently.

She was still just a kid. She had heard JD refer to her as that one day. It stuck. The way she chatted on and on, it did feel childish a bit.

As if she could personally define what that meant in relation to her.

"Is it… okay if I call you Mai, Chief Gul?" Tali asked all of the sudden.

Her hood had been up in its pretty colors, lavender and faded white. They were pretty, Mai had decided, kept up when she was on the Normandy. There was a word for it, specifically, in a language Mai had felt at the edges of her memory describing her hood. Something about veil, barrier, separation. She couldn't remember but it had connected with who she was, ethnically: She was an Arab. More than that though, another word came up. She was a gypsy.

The both of them.

"It is fine." Mai responded blankly. "Thank you."

"Oh no, it's the least I could do. Don't worry about it..." Tali dragged the last word out with consideration, poorly hidden, but Mai didn't expect anything less. She owed her. "Though, if you could help me out, I was wondering if you could give me pointers on strength training."

Mai looked at her up and down. She was thin, compared to even most Human women. The bodies of the Quarians were not meant for the martial culture and physicality of more planetside endeavors in centuries and it reflected.

Hitman and Wrex had been training her still, even JD and Garrus in more specialized, anecdotal items, and yet she had wanted more.

"Why?" Mai asked.

Tali had an answer quick. "The Geth. I have to be as strong as I can to fight them. Simple as that."

"You are doing okay, as you are now."

"I need to be better." Tali strained. "If I could just be more like you, out there, if I could bring that to my people, it might be enough for me to return home after this."

Mai had never regretted what she had gone through to become a Spartan. She had never had to think of subjecting that to other people.

"I'm… I, I'm not sure."

Tali stared at her for a few seconds, her expression unreadable to Mai.

"If you don't mind then, I'll ask JD." Tali was feeling a little more alien by the second, especially saying that. Mai had turned her head as if she had a helmet on, and Tali had been more than away that she wasn't supposed to catch her side-eye. She thought she could weather it, with her new found confidence in battle and kills beneath her belt now. She couldn't though: seeing those piercing blue eyes that read of electricity, drilling through her, seeing into her at her very core somehow. "I- uh- I mean, it's why I'm asking you first."

Mai rose an eyebrow subtly. "Why?"

Tali had shrugged, taking a moment to choose her words very carefully. "You two seem… spoken for each other."

Mai tilted her head. "I'm… not familiar with the term."

"Oh. Uh, is it the translator?"

"I'm not sure, but what do you mean?"

Tali had looked at her in a way that only a fellow "stuck in suit" person could. As in blankly, not hiding her face, and yet… There was a hesitation to it. "It's nothing." Tali finally let out, and that was that. Mai couldn't read any further as she considered moreso what she could do with Tali.

"I'll help you, let me just gather my thoughts about it. Is that acceptable?" That was the best she could do, the Spartan figured.

Mai, with her honed eyes, could see the shadow of a smile behind the cloud of her visor. "I'd like that. Thank you, Mai."

The Quarian left her staring at the table and her weapon, worn, the grip of it needed tape or else her hold on it would've crushed through it in due time. The simplicity of her blades, of the two knives off to the corner of the table overdue for a sharpening, had been the only weapons of hers that had survived for so long. From Spartan Lasers to MA5s, nothing survived her.

A breath she did not know she held in in front of Tali had come out the second she left, from the bottom of her throat a sharp hit of pain that rolled up her lungs and into her mouth. With no cloth in sight, feeling what was coming, she had simply palmed her mouth and let it come: The blood and mucus of inside of her, brought up by internal injuries.

The sight of her own blood.

As a Spartan, self-contained in her suits and armor, she never saw it often, if at all. Any blood that would leak would be contained by automatic medicinal foam and her suits own abilities. If she saw it at all, she was dead. That's what she had believed before today, and it made her stare at her own redness in her hand with a dread she hadn't felt since she was a little girl. For all the battles she had fought, for all that she had proven to herself, there was still something that could hurt her so easily. She could be killed. Just. Like. That. A flick of someone's hand. It was unacceptable, totally, completely to her, and yet, instead of disappointment and rage, there was only dread. Fear.

It had been a long time since she had feared.

Looking at her blood she saw her reflection in it, and all she could do was breath. And breath. And breath. And breath. She couldn't stop her body from breathing as she felt the pain in her rise up again but she couldn't help it as she felt it again, boil inside of her: of her very bones curling inward.

"Mai."

How many people could say that they had hurt a Spartan and lived? Not Shiala, but her pain continued onward in her memory. Saved. She had to remember what it felt like to fight against it later. Replaying again and again what it felt like to be hurt from the inside with such a force that she couldn't even see or fight against.

"Mai?"

What if the Covenant got their hands on Eezo? What if they had found some way to convince Biotics to fight for them? What if the Covenant was still trying to end Humanity and she had feigned herself to believed that maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't be an enemy anymore.

"Mai!" Jonathan-Jameson Durante. JD. ODST. Private First Class once. Now Master Chief Petty Officer. It was him, and Mai wasn't thinking about her mistakes, her injuries. JD had been where Tali had just been with a rag in his hand and a concerned look on his face. "You alright there, Spartan?"

He called her Spartan. He knew what it meant: strength.

She needed it.

"Uh, yeah, yeah." It was unconvincing, both at its content, then its presentation as Mai again started coughing up, seizing the rag from JD's hand and putting it at her mouth. He had never seen her face in pain before, and so he had learned she took all pain with open eyes. It was as she was trained, but even then, there was a painful squint to them that gave her momentary crow's feet.

All that pressure on her lungs had been so great, so hot that it threatened to burn her up.

Then a counter-point however. The feel of a hand across the center of her back, above her lungs, just the lightest of pressure. It didn't push her lungs further; it was just there. She concentrated on it as she breathed in and out into the now wet rag.

She knew it was JD's hand.

A minute that had felt of a year had passed and Mai's coughing had turned itself down until there had been none. Expectantly, she knew that JD was looking at her with that face of concern he always wore when he asked her about her.

"You need to go to medbay." It was an order. He wanted it to be an order.

She shook her head. "It's too full now. I'll live its just bruising of my ribs and lungs."

"So I heard, but you need medical attention."

"I can handl- hck!"

Trying to put any force into her words had made her cough again, and the once grey rag had turned dark red where she put it.

"Chief Gul." It left JD to put force into his voice, and for a moment, her indoctrination betrayed her. She wanted to take those orders.

"JD I'm fine. I'll go when it clears up. That's final."

He had heard in the hour since Feros what had happened to her: How an Asari reached into her and tried to crush her lungs with her ribs. How in the moments after she had asked Wrex to simply do that in reverse. It was a rush job, but it was enough to relieve the pressure. Rib subluxation, JD had pegged. Simply her ribs were out of place and might've needed some heavy adjustment by the grace of the Medbay. The Medbay was full though: with Hitmen. Chakwas had even then still been occupied with Shepard. Mai had a point, but JD couldn't let her just sit there in pain.

He was, technically, a combat medic. Training to be, of course, but still one by his regard.

Mai looked at him with her defiant eyes, the ones he recognized. He didn't know if she was just stubborn or really believed in her invulnerability as a Spartan. Though in the end it circled around to a question he had asked so many times: Was she Human?

He pushed a breath through his nose before he got himself worked up, finding his center, remembering his past:

"My Mother had panic attacks, and when she had them there were breathing exercises I worked her through. I think they could help. Please. If anything, would you just try this for now?"

Mai remained silent, but it didn't stick as she felt the fire in her breath form again, beckoning her to cough. She trusted him here. "Fine."

He gestured with his hand to behind the Mako, he pulling up a crate next to her cot, putting him level as he could with her as he sat on it, cross-legged.

"Criss-cross-applesauce." Mai had let slip from her mouth, and JD, after a moment of confusion, remembered. He nodded in recognition and there was only a little amusement Mai had gotten from it as she sat herself, opposite of JD.

Eye to eye. It was very rare that they had been like this. There was a question on his mind at that moment, staring into Mai's eyes, however as he opened his mouth, he saw Mai's grit, the way she tried to keep her breathing not painful.

"My left eye, focus on it." He said once.

"Yes." She responded, doing so.

Hazel eyes. Old, and yet young. Younger than hers, and yet not at the same time. He was getting scruffy, she noticed. She wondered when she learned that word: scruffy.

"Center your breathing. Match mine." His hands moved along his own chest, as if animating the breath inside of him as he inhaled, exhaled. It was slow, distinct, but not forced.

"Mm." A little grunt, a little hit of pain as she did match JD's. He noticed immediately, and a pinprick in his mind wanted to help. He had to stay calm for it to work.

He had started his breaths large, listening for her to match and the strain he had heard, stepping them down and the air he brought in slowly. With each cycle, her breaths had gotten less and less ragged. He was trying to find her max capacity at the moment.

"Match your inhales to exhales. Stay within what doesn't hurt for now." Long minutes went by, the images in their eyes frozen: each other. They shared the pace of breath. "Relax."

Mai's shoulder, stiff as they had been, had drooped, but she felt guilty. "I'm sorry I didn't catch that attacker beforehand. I was unprepared."

Another cycle before JD responded. "Don't worry about it. Who could've known?"

"Jon." There was worry in her voice and JD almost tripped over his breath as she said his name. "It wasn't right."

She called him that planetside, and a worried look came over his face even she saw.

She tilted her head, a questioned asked.

JD had gulped in a breath. "Ah, oh, it's nothing. It's just that not hearing you say JD is, weird… and the last person to call me Jon like that was Dawn."

"What do you mean?"

JD pursed his lips as they went through another breathing cycle. "Dawn was, is-" He didn't know what words to pick. "We were very close. I was comfortable with her calling me Jon."

"Am I not allowed?"

"No, no." JD had immediately sprung up. "It's just… It's me, not you."

JD for now then, Mai decided. Why she had felt compelled to say it in the first place was beyond her, just in the moment of it. Here, now, it was more deliberate of her. Trying it on her tongue and this had been the result.

Again, Mai tilted her head at JD as she asked a question. "Did you call Dawn something besides Dawn?"

"Sunshine." And he had said it with all the slick and familiarity that could be found in the comfort of intimacy.

They kept on breathing, stepping down, and down, and Mai had to admit that she had felt very comfortable like this.

"Is this okay? Your breathing."

She nodded in her medium. Things were okay. "It's better. Thank you."

Looking at Mai for almost fifteen minutes straight had relaxing in itself, not that JD would admit that. To see her calm instead of bothered or aggravated, it was nice.

"Your Mother, what was her name?" Mai asked aloud as JD listened to her breathing still, just in case.

JD, distantly, remembered his childhood. It was a quiet childhood, all things considered: At home, his Dad would use sign language as well, so as to not exclude Mom. He learned English rather later compared to his peers, and so he had been quiet because of it. One of his childhood friends asked him if he ever blamed his Mom for how he was.

JD shook his head, sitting on the cusp of a ramp at the skate park.

He was going to open his mouth to answer, but held back.

Instead his right hand had touched upon his chest before it had gone flat in front of him, thumb coming up to his chin as the hand was vertical. His two hands came together with his index and middle fingers together with a tap. After a beat he had finger spelled. Six letters.

MY MOTHER NAME C – A – R – O – L – E

Mai nodded, understanding, but was approached with another flat palm that pulsed twice at her, he raising an eyebrow.

Mai could only use her words. "I don't remember."

JD dropped his hands as he had seen the reflectiveness on her. It was a look he had seen on her before, back on Earth and Arcturus: going through the stories of their lives so as to keep their story straight to the intelligence people. It was the before of her that made her like this.

Her thumb ran against the back of her knuckles, JD noticed.

His hand had raised again, and Mai had looked with her usual snappiness to see if he would sign.

He didn't however, reaching halfway up, but not going any further as he reigned it in. A closed fist.

"Hm?" She mumbled.

"Nothing. Nothing." He remembered the crate that he was sitting on as he looked down. "Oh yeah!" He reached down to pick it up, opening its plastic lids. "Here."

Presented to her it had been immediately apparent what it was.

Her own body temperature had been well regulated due to the techsuit usually, and she was offered a thin thermal blanket just for regulation in her accommodations. The cot she had called her resting place these last few weeks had hardly seen much in the way of creature comforts, not that she needed it.

JD saw differently.

"What is this?" She still asked.

"Shepard offered. I thought, you know, it'd be nice."

It was a grey blanket, wrapped up in a plastic bag. Extra-large according to the labelling, weighted, and lush. "I don't need this?"

JD pursed his lips. "Well, we don't really need much of anything, but I thought you'd like this." Licking the inside of his teeth, arms outstretched, as if at a kid's birthday party, there was something awkward to it. "As someone who sleeps a lot, I recommend this type of stuff… Can you feel with your techsuit?"

Mai shook her head once, still looking at the sheets. "Not to the sensitivity of skin."

JD rolled his head from side to side. "You spend a good part of your life asleep, Mai, it helps to dedicate something to it. I don't think you'll be in that thing forever, right?" Gradually, Mai reached out, taking the package from him as she carefully unzipped the affair, exposing the folded sheets to open air. To her. JD was right, there was a deceptive weight to it. "Even if you do end up on a ship, serving, I hope they give you your own quarters. Something better than this." He motioned to the cot in the dark, amidst lockers and gear.

"You think this is better?" Mai had asked, not out of malice, but of not knowing.

"It's a small step." He shrugged. "If you don't want it I can-"

"That is," she paused, trying to verbalize what felt off about this, "not necessary." Mai had croaked out slowly, unsure. There was only one part of her that had not been covered by her techsuit. Bringing the entire thing up to her face, she had rubbed one cheek against it to JD's surprise, holding it against her. "Soft." She whispered.

Against her cheek it had felt of, almost, warm snow, of lush grass and a pliability that she had not ever known. The gall and the exuberance to think that people existed in these at night.

"I don't think this is right for me." She said astutely, pulling away, keeping her breathing still. "I may not be used to it."

JD could only nod a few times. He tried. She was a creature of habit. Her habits kept her alive and he supposed sleeping had been set in stone for her.

"The Ardennes is still docked; I can turn it over."

There was reluctance to it however as JD reached to it again, Mai holding it against herself. This was a thought that flashed by her mind: "Is this a gift JD?"

"I- uh. I-" Mai tilted her head at him as he tried to find an answer. She deserved the simplest one really, even if he really didn't intend for this package to be interpreted as such. "Yeah. Sure." He looked off away, to the well deck door of the Normandy, to the sniper rifle above the lockers, to distant stars and memories to avoid Mai's gaze. "You don't get much to be comfortable down here and I just thought…" He drifted.

"I see."

There was a blankness in her mind, running through premade plans and impositions about what to do. Everything in her life she had been trained to process what had happened to her by reflex and action. Before that, before she was a Spartan, the world was not kind enough to her to even entertain this: She had never gotten a gift before. Not like this. Her Spartanhood was a gift, she knew, but this in her hands, bundled up and ready to be used in its non-military packaging and design, meant for a more civil world, this was a gift in a more traditional sense.

Of all the things that did feel right to her however, it had been who had given her it. Her contention was not of him; not in any real sense. Once, what felt like years ago, they had been trapped in a cell, she had had her very skin ripped off of her, and he had offered his pants for her. It made sense to her that he had been a giver in some way. Further beyond that, when she was a child, she was given the gift of life.

She had a mother once who tried to gift her more.

Mai was unreadable to JD as she just looked down at the bundle. A stray, black bang fell from her face. Her hair had been getting long, more and more tied into a longer pony tail that was so different than how it first was when he saw her in the flesh.

"I will… hold onto it?" She offered.

JD's eyes widened and the next breath into his nose had been electric. "Hm? Oh yeah, sure. Try it out." He held his hands at his stomach, unsure of what to do with them. "If not maybe I can get you another… gift? Yeah, gift."

There was a hint of annoyance in Mai's eyes as JD explained. He sounded a little like Garrus now, with how much they talked. Though it was okay. It would have to be okay to her.

"You do not need to gift me anything, JD. It's not necessary."

The corner of JD's mouth had gone into a quick frown. "Again, Mai, it's the little things that people deserve. We're only Human."

Only Human. She passed by the thought.

What was it to be Human?

"Thank you." She blurt out less than gracefully, realizing that he, at the very least, deserved it.

JD by habit had cupped his hand at his chest as if grabbing something from the air, bringing it in. He hadn't even realized he did it.

YOU'RE WELCOME

"It's nothing." He shrugged.

Mai thought otherwise, shifting the package up as if he hadn't seen it. "It's a gift."

They both breathed easy after that, the Ardennes recovering the colonists from Zhu's Hope and the Normandy underway to Altis. It would be a few days before they would get there, a few days before another reckoning with the present Covenant, however the two chiefs bided their time. It was no use fighting it, not for them. There would always be the Covenant. They just needed to live with it now. So in the following nights in the quiet burndown from Feros, the Normandy's Marines had recovered, giving a wide berth from Mai as business resumed, to anyone's perception, normally.

---

It was night time on the Normandy when Shepard was deemed okay in her own thoughts, tentatively. Okay in the sense that her body didn't mind it when she swung her legs from the side of her soaked bed after her eyes darted open and saw her ceiling. A nurse had been assigned to watch over her during the nights, but the one on shift now had been tuckered out.

With all her stealth training she had, realizing that she had been down to her skinnies, soaked, changed out into a new set and into proper clothes. She dreaded to know how much time had been lost, and how much shit she was going to get from Chakwas about being up and about, but she was still a CO of a ship. Flashing her omni she read the Normandy's telemetry and a backlog of reports and summaries from Kaiden for each shift and hour.

Three days, she realized, throwing up her omni to check. It'd been three days since Feros and now had been the first time she was lucid. She felt it: a pierce of her brain, of her memory, it compartmentalized all that pain. She would deal with it when she would, just not now.

There were cameras throughout the Normandy, all feeding back into Shepard's omni, however she had hardly used it since she boarded. It wasn't right to her, and she could just check on anyone in person if the need was warranted. Tonight, might've been one of those nights, the Normandy deemed and its crew in half for the sake of a sleeping schedule. She wouldn't dare do her rounds without being briefed by Chakwas.

On the bridge, Pressly had been up plotting a course to Altis smoothly enough, Joker letting some of the autopilot take over as he simply slept in his chair up there, a blanket cast over him with some sports mascot on it.

Speaking of blankets.

There had been a camera that caught Mai behind the Mako and her accommodations. Pitiful as they were, she had never complained about it. Hopefully, Shepard thought, Altis would provide her a stasis pod for her. Though it didn't seem needed at that moment with her. She hadn't a pillow and her sheets had been emergency issue from a survival kit, which was why it had been understandable that JD had asked via her for blankets. Shepard had a million thoughts about the two chiefs, one of them being that JD had been Mai's handler.

Whatever the case was the result was the same:

She hadn't used her newly acquired blanket as a blanket, interestingly enough. Mai slept like the dead: a straight body on a cot that had been going above and beyond its call of duty. With the blanket however, it had changed. She had turned her blanket into a pillow or cushion of sorts, balled up, her head half turned on it as she seemed inclined in her sleep to lean into it, nuzzling it.

She was a monster on the battlefield, taking her fists to a plant monstrosity and winning, and yet even she was susceptible to something as simple as a blanket.

Interestingly enough JD hadn't been at the wall besides her as he had occasionally done. Taking a glance at the feed of the stasis pods he had been in one, nestled between Kaidan and Ashley's.

Grabbing a water bottle by her bedside, she beat back the cotton in her mouth, sliding on one of her more comfortable affairs: Apparently someone in the Alliance brass saw it pertinent that all N7s have access to apparel denoting their deeds. She wouldn't say no to an N7 hoodie, especially not tonight as, after knowingly giving her would be caretaker a glance, quietly shifted out of her quarters.

One of the few Marine guards on duty had been shocked to see her.

"Ma'am-!" He saluted but she had stopped that, holding a finger to her lips.

"If Doctor Chakwas comes looking, I'll be in comms."

The Hitman had seen Shepard give her warm smile, seemingly unbothered by what had just been thrust upon her, and he sputtered, nodding, letting Shepard walk up the stairs to the command deck.

Pressly had been at the helm. He belonged there, Shepard thought. Not her. Still with a literal galaxy before him he hadn't noticed her slink past another few Marine guards into the comms room.

There was a comm buoy nearby, close enough for her to ghost her hands over the controls and consider, for a moment, what she was doing.

There was a great many needs pressed upon her, people she needed to talk to, people who depended on her, and yet of all the people that she had rung up in the minutes after she had been up from the pain, her mind, her heart compelled her to do this desperately:

"Computer. Give me a real-time connection to the dreadnaught Kilimanjaro. I want to speak to my mother; XO Shepard."

It was a quick connection. The Kilimanjaro was Hackett's flagship, and it had been forward of them, over Altis, holding positions with a portion of the Fifth Fleet as security of Alliance interests over Altis.

The connection went live and Shepard had held the railing of the comms center tightly. This was so unlike her, she knew.

Such connections often didn't include visual, but that's not what Shepard needed or expected.

Groggily, as it was the night for most Alliance timetables, Shepard had heard a voice of home.

"Shepard speaking-" Shepard had imagined it with how she sounded, she was in bed and turned on the console on her table bedside. She knew the room on the Kilimanjaro, pictures had been exchanged when she had set up the pictures and mail from admirers in her own quarters. It took a moment for Captain Hannah Shepard to realize who had been calling. "Oh! Hi- Commander, I'm on duty."

Shepard smiled, rolling her eyes. She needed the sleep as much as any. Being XO of Admiral Hackett's ship would demand much of her, though Shepard wouldn't be long.

"Hey Mom…" She sounded like a kid again, coming up to Mom after a bad day. A younger woman, a kid, a child, that she once was. Her mother knew it.

"Sweetheart?" All pre-tense of the ranks they held were dropped and concern was in it. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." It was a lie, but right now, talking to Mom, it was okay. "I just, I just needed to hear your voice." And she had. Shepard considered hanging up just then but that would've only garnered a concerned return call.

"Oh sweetie." Hannah had breathed softly. "Did something happen?"

"I can't answer that." Shepard spoke frankly, but tiredly, what rejuvenation she felt from being able to get up from bed and walk fading. "You know, Spectre business. It's why I didn't call after I was inducted."

"I'm your mother, Janie. You can tell me a whole lot otherwise. You know this. We'll always be there for you."

Shepard felt tears swell in her eyes for a flash, but dragged them away. "I don't know why but, I just needed to know you were okay."

A long silence dragged, but it wasn't cold or hard. It was just understanding. "I am very much okay, right now, Jane Kennedy Shepard. I hope you are too."

She needed that. More than she knew or had ever felt before. She also needed this before she got too emotional:

A masculine, familiar voice. "And what about me Jay-Kay?"

She laughed, trying to stifle it as if to hide herself from the crew beyond the door. It wasn't needed. "Hey Dad."

John Shepard. The other Commander Shepard. Leader of the Kilimanjaro's Marine regiment.

Being a Marine, being in the service, it was in her blood all the way back to a proud British naval tradition during the colonial period. She thought she was going to break it, being the last of the line of Shepard. Instead she had become its jewel.

"I don't have to worry about you, Pops."

"Oh that hurt, Jay-Kay."

"Doubt it. Nothing can get to you."

He heard the sheets of their shared bed shift, probably, by Shepard's thought, coming to the side of the bed and facing the comm console on their quarters in the Kilimanjaro, a picture of her set up on bedside. It was the same picture she had on her coffee mug.

"Pretty risky call to be making kiddo." John Shepard remarked despite it all. "Are you okay?"

"Oh, shush honey. Our kid just needs her parents." Hannah chided

"And the Kilimanjaro needs their officers in tip top shape." John Shepard yawned a bit. "I love you kiddo, but there's so many things about you being a Spectre, what's going on over Altis, and what you're caught up with that I don't think this call is in our best interest. I mean this in the kindest way I can put it. Your Mom just got into a yelling match with a few Quarians earlier and it's only gonna continue tomorrow."

Hannah gaffed behind the call but she couldn't disagree.

"I know Pops, I know. I'll let you get back to sleep but… Things could be so much worse." Shepard hadn't even know why she had said that, her eyes widening, but yet it had been the most sane she ever felt like she said.

"Course'" John Shepard agreed. "But you're not gonna let that happen, right?"

"Of course." Shepard said quietly, brushing her hair, missing the bun that she usually kept it in. "I don't know if we can, but uh, let's get lunch on Altis? I'll be there soon. You know that, right?"

Hannah returned. "We were notified from Alliance Intellignece, yes. I think a Spectre like you can find a way to make it happen… We'd like that, sweetheart."

"Okay. We will. I'll let you get back to sleep. I'm sorry I called. I really am."

"Don't worry about it, sweetheart. I think you're allowed a little call, here and there."

"Knock them dead out there. We're all real proud of you kiddo."

Shepard smiled at herself, at everything. This little family they had; it was broken once. Scattered amongst the stars and Earth itself. Now it was mended and good and, in some small part, the way she treated her own crew came from how she treated her blood family.

"I should go."

"We should go."

All three of them had said at the same time, only for a bumble of laughter to follow through as the call ended.

Confiding in herself the knowledge that her mother was okay, it settled a turmoil in Shepard she hadn't even known before. An itch beneath the skin, perhaps always there. It was no matter.

Business now:

"Computer. Put me through to the Council on my Spectre credentials."

Instead of the three Councilors however she got a surprise when the holographics came up, staring eye to eye with her:

"Nihlus? How are you…" Shepard tried to find the words to explain the impossibility before her. "Whole?"

He was as he was when she first saw him on the Normandy. With her proximity to Garrus nowadays it had made the stark contrast of what figure Nihlus cut so much more present. He was taller than Garrus, his skin darker and his white face point more defined, more war like. A predator in his prime, looking at her with the beady eyes of a raptor. It might've intimidated her, but there was something more pressing that trumped all of that: The last time she had seen him he was broken and burned. He was barely a body.

The Turian gave her only a grim smile as he nodded a few times to himself. "I've been reading your reports to the Council. You're very upfront about your findings, aren't you?"

Shepard's dry mouth returned to her as she put together a response. "I'm very good at report writing, I like to think."

"Your reports are, at minimum, 10,000 words Shepard." Nihlus had snarked.

"Hey, I try to keep the max only about," God she really was terrible to anyone who reads about what she had done, "around 30k… Anyway, Nihlus, what's going on? Why'd you pick up?"

How fast was treatment, Jesus Christ!

Nihlus had nodded a few times, crossing his arms. "Nothing pressing, asides from your current assignment. I just wanted to reach out before you reported today. Are you adjusting to this work well?"

There was a glimmer of emotion on the Turian's face, Shepard tried to read. "Chasing Saren has been exhausting, admittedly, but we're turning up more leads, every hour." A thought. Nihlus looked prim and proper. "Will you join us in the hunt, Nihlus? We need you, with what you know of Saren."

Nihlus brought his arms behind his back and straightened his chest. "Rest assured, Shepard I am providing as much assistance as I can from the Citadel. I will let you proceed with your report to the Council, however, when you are able, return to the Citadel for your first in-person debrief with me. There are a few things that even Spectres won't discuss over secure lines."

"Heh. I suppose. Looking forward to it." Shepard had made a friendly salute, but she paused, looking at Nihlus. Looking at him and the fact he seemed very much okay. "I'm glad you're okay, Spectre."

Nihlus stared back at her, and he cut the call.

Shepard blinked at the cut off. Had she done something wrong?

No, she figured. She left people like that all the time. Not on purpose of course.

Without further ado Shepard had rung up the Council as if they were old friends, and, quickly, the oral report she had given had been instilling some part as to why she was becoming their new favorite Spectre.

---

So many cities they had burned. So many cities they had gone into to slaughter Humans. So many millions, so many worlds destroyed. All for the purpose of carrying out the Will of the Prophets, and to commence the Great Journey. In another world, in another universe, the day they would've stood there on Earth, in the African state of Kenya, it would've been in a victorious war. It was a victory that only Usze would've been alive for, if history went a certain way.

This was not that world. It would never be.

Away from the city of Mombasa, away from the African coastline and the temporarily docked Ardent Prayer, the Covenant stood on Humanity's birthplace.

Golden plains. It was a Human savannah which Usze had never seen before, so at peace.

Not on fire.

"Two million years ago modern Humans emerged from this land and started to move throughout this world." He was the ambassador for an Earthen national community on that continent, representing his people on the Human political stage. It was his honor to introduce, in some ways, Humanity as a whole. "Here, where we stand, Humanity has seen fit to preserve it as best we can, as it once was."

Even a cursory glance, the very typical recon and intelligence work that the Ardent Prayer could do from orbit, it didn't mean much to the Covenant.

These cities had been like those on the usual colonies of the UNSC, and this was on Earth's capital. It was still an oddity that they had been, all things considered, nearly 400 years prior to their own time scale.

Usze had been on Karonee's side as she listened to the ambassador speak of birthplace and origin. A procession of Covenant representatives from all their races walking in step with the dark Human male as he extended his arms to the horizon.

Karonee wondered, sniffing the air, thinking of her ancestors. "Are you," she shifted her cape, speaking to the Human ambassador. "The same Humans as you were when these plains were, back then?"

The ambassador adjusted his glasses as he considered the question.

A Jackal chittered as his feral instincts felt danger in the long grass. The Drones had chittered at the air as if calling for distant cousins.

"Humans, are an adaptable species." He explained, looking to the golden horizon. "We are not, say, the Humans that once walked these plains with nothing but the hunt in our hearts and no concept of the stars beyond. But we are very much like them."

"Are you?" Karonee rattled.

"We have, by virtue of having gone to the stars, together, in speaking to you like this, a better type of Human. We are, hopefully, holding within us, less of their faults and more of their strengths. This is by necessity, by the passage of the many generations that now go beyond Earth. Though we have not forgotten where we have come from."

Karonee and Usze, and the Covenant themselves, stood on Earth. Not as conquerors or crusaders, but as guests.

The Ambassador slouched down, squatting on the dirt, motioning for Karonee to do the same. She did, eye to eye, almost knee to knee with the man as they stood on unbroken nature, only the parked shuttles and the standing guards reminding them civilization was somewhere.

"You, a Sangheili, lost of their Homeworld, I cannot begin to know what it would be like to lose it. However, I ask you, whatever you may do going forward in this galaxy, remember that no matter who we are or where we come from, we come from this dirt." The Ambassador reached down to earthen brown dirt and dug his fingers in. Karonee could only notice that his skin had been the same color, and that, maybe, he had meant it literally. She, among many of them there, knew what it had been like to see Humans turn to dust. With a grabbing of dirt, some falling through his fingers, the Ambassador motioned for Karonee to open up her hand flat and up.

Usze had disagreed with the notion, he turning away from her, but she had obliged the Ambassador as she felt the sieved dirt crumbling onto her bare hand.

"Everything on this planet, everywhere there is Humanity, know that we come from this."

Usze had wanted to laugh. Of course, Humans came from something as pitiful as dirt. Karonee had thought differently however. The dirt came into her hand entirely and she felt it seep into her hand's scales, turning it over it, save for a few clumpy portions, returned to the Earth.

"You have come far." She nodded at the Ambassador.

A heretical thought, derived from his smile, crossed by Karonee's mind. How could a Godless race such as the Humans make it as far as they did without the Covenant? She thought of the Humanity she had been in war with, and this Humanity here. Humanity always stood alone it seemed; weak, as they were predisposed to with naturally against the broader races and powers, but they stood still.

In this galaxy, the Sangheili, or, at least, the genetic ancestors of the Sangheili, foretold by ancient Quarian archives, were nothing more than animals.

Usze, off in the distance by his trained eye, saw the shimmer of a four-legged beast. He raised his carbine, peering through its scope. A great fur coat had engulfed its neck as fangs were seen bared, animal eyes somewhat looking at him at what felt like hundreds of yards away before disappearing away.

"A lion. They are natural predators." The Ambassador had noticed Usze looking away and out as he stood again, wiping his hands with a handkerchief. "Very dangerous to us. It's a miracle that Humanity was lucky enough to have not been stamped out by them."

Lucky? Undeserving then, the Humans were. Sangheili were, from the very first second, able to fight for their lives and kill. "Could a Human take on a lion in fair combat? With nothing but what they were born with?" Usze asked harshly.

The Ambassador had wondered, looking out, knowing of the pride that remained there in that reserve. "Can you?" He posed.

The exchange had remained in Usze's head for his remaining time on Earth, the Alliance organizing for the crew of the Ardent Prayer to tour their homeworld. The thought was only compounded with this then, touring a nation-state in what the Humans called the continent of Asia. The founding documents of a place called Vietnam read this:

All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free… And thus the entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.

Amongst a beautiful lily garden in that country, the Covenant representatives had been given rest, listening to the silence of water and lilies.

There was no peace in Usze. "When the Humans burned," he spoke, almost to no one but his reflection as Karonee held a pink petal in her hand. The city they were in, it was called the city of ghosts. "Did they understand why they died?"

The worlds Karonee glassed, they never provided that answer.

"They knew they lost. And yet they would still fight us," The Covenant were the lions once. "For their survival?"

For what was liberty and independence without life?

Karonee considered. "What do we die for, Usze Tahamee?" She posed the question back, pink petals in her hand from a tree whose branches came close to their patio. The Brutes were otherwise being treated to a local meal and the Elites of the group had no patience to deal with their barbarity in eating. Vietnam, Asia, it felt familiar to the Elites, especially in gardens such as this. So a great deal loitered amongst the quiet places in the city of ghosts, echoing ancient history and a somber, misty attitude that they never got to see in the war on Human planets.

"For the Great Journey."

Karonee tipped her head up at Usze's answer.

"It is a higher calling, no? Perhaps Human values are believed to be as much worth dying for as our own callings."

"Greater than our Great Journey?" Usze asked of Karonee. She sighed, letting the petals drop to the water.

"As Humans lack the Great Journey, perhaps we Elites lack…" She quieted herself, looking across the gardens and seeing the San'Shyuum Prelate standing like a statue, amongst statues.

What would her life, and indeed all Elite lives be, without the Covenant? Without the Prophets?

"No," She revised her words, turning to her spec ops commander. "There is nothing greater than the Great Journey."

Though, she admitted to herself, she was not remised to the detour they were on now.

It was nice to come to a Human world and not fight. Her guilt was written in her wist for her own Homeworld. Soon enough however, soon enough, she knew, she would return to it.

"So, this is what it's like to not be haunted by Demons…"